A place of relevance (POR) may be any physical location and/or area that is significant to a person, who may, for instance, be a user of a mobile computing device (e.g., a wireless handset, cellular phone, smart phone, personal digital assistant (PDA), etc.). Whether a particular place is significant to the user may depend on and/or be measured by a period of time that the user spends in the physical location and/or area corresponding to the particular place. Thus, a computing device may determine that a particular place is a POR if a user of the computing device (and correspondingly, the computing device itself) remains stationary and/or spends a sufficiently long period of time in the particular place.
It is also known in the prior art for a user to supply labels, to identify places that have relevance to the user. For example, a first set of measurements may be made by a mobile device, when the mobile device is stationary. The user may thereafter label the place, where these measurements are made, as an “office.” Similarly, a second set of measurements may be made when the mobile device is stationary at another location, which may thereafter be labeled by the user as “home.” Accordingly, areas in which the first and second sets of measurements are made constitute two places of relevance to the user.
Therefore, there is a need to identify places of relevance of the type described above, based not only on measurements made when a mobile device is stationary but also based on measurements that are made when a mobile device is not stationary, i.e. measurements made when the mobile device is moving. One problem identified by the inventors arises when a mobile device is moved by a user along a path in a store (such as a department store, e.g. J.C. Penny or Macy's), where the user does not spend several minutes stationary in one spot but instead the user is generally walking around the confines of the store. Hence, there is a need to use measurements that are made when a mobile device is moving, to identify a place of relevance as described below.